Artificial intelligence and sign theory

摘要

Research in artificial intelligence is often regarded as pertaining to the fields of engineering or informatics.Intelligent robots, expert systems, automatic translators, so it is said, belong to the world of computer technology.But is this really the case?Even a cursory study will easily show that things are not that simple as a well orchestrated marketing would have us think.A deeper analysis of the problem would easily show that AI is much more an undertaking that pertains to formal and abstract discipline than to concrete and material technologies.The following essay will attempts to show that AI is in fact related intimately to abstract disciplines and, more specifically, to semiotics ;it is a applied semiotic venture. AI's Territory,The original objective of AI was to have the computer execute tasks or actions characteristic of living beings showing intelligent behavior.Promises of success were abundant.However instead of providing an abstract definition of the type of activities comprising AI,the discipline, for a long time, presented only an extensional list of practices that one could recognize as paradigms of AI projects.Thus, chess games, theorems proving, problem solving and the like became typical examples of AI ventures.. Later, projects on perception and pattern recognition were introduced.However, it was primarily with the introduction of natural language processing and robotics that the main trend of AI was deliniated.More recently, AI specialized its programs and systems to the degree that they were said to be expert with regard to such tasks such as medical diagnostics, chemistry and even physics analysis.Even though, throughout its development, artificial intelligence has defined itself in concrete terms with projects of the 'high technology' type, it has also constantly aimed at arriving at a more abstract definition of its object.Allen Newell (1983),in a study of the historical development of this discipline, has shown how AI, after travelling through various paradigms, finally found its own route.Indeed, since its origin in the fifties AI has in turn to distinguished itself in turns from cybernetics, systems theory, pattern recognition, numerical computing, programming theory, electrical engineering, and finally, formal logic.It is only recently in the eighties that it seems to have arrived at a more precise delimitation of its own territory. The Metaphor of IntelligenceIf one analyses the various projects that have built the reputation of AI in an effort to distinguish its central preoccupation, it would not be too difficult to classify them under the predicates of 'projects simulating intelligent behavior by use of the computer'.Indeed, how is it possible not to describe a machine that plays chess as having 'artificial intelligence'.If in its origin this concept of intelligence was thought as a metaphor for describing a class of projects, it has now changed its status and position.Indeed, it is the computer itself that has now become the metaphor of intelligence and even, for many researchers a "model' of this intelligence: